"Do let me introduce you to Miss Galway," she wheezed. "You'll get on so well with Mr. Askew, dear Miss Galway. He's navy, you know, or has been--left it--going to be married. And Mr. Askew, if you can talk of Ph[oe]nician inscriptions to Miss Galway, she'll entertain you for hours. Quite an authority on Solomon, I believe--very clever, most intellectual!" Then aside, hastily: "Say nothing about her brother--jail!"
Poor Askew! Miss Galway proved to be a limpet, and held on to him desperately, not because he was handsome, but for the sake of the two ears he possessed, into which she could pour her archæological triumphs.
She prosed in a manly voice about Hiram of Tyre and the building of Solomon's Temple, and the probability that its design was copied from the Shrine of Moloch, and the remains that Zerubbabel must have found after the Babylonian captivity, until his poor head buzzed like a saw-mill. In the hope of stopping this endless trickle of nothings he cajoled her to the supper-room. There, at a small table well-covered, Lady Jim ate and drank and chatted, light-heartedly, with a sharp-eyed, sun-dried mummy. She nodded a "How d'y do?" to her sailor, and smilingly observed his entanglement. Luckily for the preservation of Askew's temper, a rival archæologist arrived to discuss Hittite grammar, and he managed to slip away while the male and female dryasdusts wrangled over the probable origin of the Perizzites.
"You haven't been near me all the evening," complained Leah, when Wallace received his congé and Askew sat in the seat of the scornful.
"Didn't see you arrive, worse luck. If you'd been dosed with Hivites and Jebusites and all that truck, as I've been, you'd have a headache, too."
"It's unusual for you to have a headache."
"And inevitable for me to have a heartache."
"On account of that alphabet woman, I suppose. Why don't you feed?"
"No appetite. But if you'll come along to the Cecil----"
"Certainly not. We've been there much too often of late. People will talk."